Real engagement will mean more than an inactive profile

But the real lesson for media companies is that whether you want to be part of Google+ or not, because the search giant is giving so much prominence to those kinds of results, you need to consider doing so, if only so that your content is more obvious when someone does a search, as Harvard professor Ben Edelman notes in a post on the changes. It is no different from making sure you have keywords and tags and other SEO-friendly tools in place on your stories, but because it’s social it is also a bit more complicated.